Also keep in mind that set designers of the time knew that standard color stages wouldn't show up on black and white TV's that well, so they would crank the colors up to 11 to get the desired result for B&W viewers.

MrSteve007:Also keep in mind that set designers of the time knew that standard color stages wouldn't show up on black and white TV's that well, so they would crank the colors up to 11 to get the desired result for B&W viewers.

As is part of the reason that when color tv came in, that some shows like Star Trek went over the top with color on the sets - y'know, so folk knew this was TV IN COLOR!

UberNeuman:MrSteve007: Also keep in mind that set designers of the time knew that standard color stages wouldn't show up on black and white TV's that well, so they would crank the colors up to 11 to get the desired result for B&W viewers.

As is part of the reason that when color tv came in, that some shows like Star Trek went over the top with color on the sets - y'know, so folk knew this was TV IN COLOR!

OtherLittleGuy:UberNeuman: MrSteve007: Also keep in mind that set designers of the time knew that standard color stages wouldn't show up on black and white TV's that well, so they would crank the colors up to 11 to get the desired result for B&W viewers.

As is part of the reason that when color tv came in, that some shows like Star Trek went over the top with color on the sets - y'know, so folk knew this was TV IN COLOR!

\loves me some Star Trek, but gods the colors are a bit much.....

Sort of like 3D these days in movie theatres and HDTV.

Don't forget that there would still have been massive numbers of black and white tvs out there. I'd bet a majority.

UberNeuman:As is part of the reason that when color tv came in, that some shows like Star Trek went over the top with color on the sets - y'know, so folk knew this was TV IN COLOR!\loves me some Star Trek, but gods the colors are a bit much.....

While I was born long after the transition to color, I did go to school for TV & film production and have played with some of the old equipment of the era. I'd imagine that the accuracy of the color capture devices wasn't that great, then much of the signal accuracy was lost in the over-the-air transmission, and early home TV sets probably weren't exactly Adobe RGB calibrated either.

What we see today, in restored digital blue-ray versions of the early color shows, likely wasn't anywhere close to what was rendered at home with similar technology:

The cinematographers who supervised the lighting of 1960s color TV shows had a special eyepiece to show what the set looked like in B&W. Black and White was in the majority well into the 70s, actually.

Trek looked great in color - in fact, it made NBC's parent company a ton of money by selling RCA color TVs - but it looked so-so in black and white, which also tended to have smaller screens, when people bought color sets, they bought a bigger set (bigger for the 60's that is!). (The remastered Trek looks absolutely amazing on an HD screen, especially when it is being streamed. ) Trek always scored near the top of the so-called 'color ratings'.

I remember reading back when Turner was colorizing old black and white films that the criticism of that practice was that art directors carefully gauged IRL set colors to "translate" the correct depth and hues to black and white TVs of the day, and that it was a lot of work, and pretty much a science of its own.

I find that garish stage set fascinating, because when the above argument about design was mentioned I could not imagine what would have to be so different, but this pretty much fits with what I imagined.

Same with Roman & Greek temples and statues up until they started engaging in proto-archaeology and uncovering then trading old stuff which had lost its paint - making the same incorrect inference the early antiquarians did. Some of that stuff was painted to look realistic and some of it was nearly fluorescent.

The eye melting multicolour aesthetic is really popular throughout the world and through time.

zeppo:The cinematographers who supervised the lighting of 1960s color TV shows had a special eyepiece to show what the set looked like in B&W. Black and White was in the majority well into the 70s, actually.

Trek looked great in color - in fact, it made NBC's parent company a ton of money by selling RCA color TVs - but it looked so-so in black and white, which also tended to have smaller screens, when people bought color sets, they bought a bigger set (bigger for the 60's that is!). (The remastered Trek looks absolutely amazing on an HD screen, especially when it is being streamed. ) Trek always scored near the top of the so-called 'color ratings'.

Came to mention this when I saw Trek mentioned upthread. That show was almost a loss-leader for RCA/NBC.

MrSteve007:While I was born long after the transition to color, I did go to school for TV & film production and have played with some of the old equipment of the era. I'd imagine that the accuracy of the color capture devices wasn't that great, then much of the signal accuracy was lost in the over-the-air transmission, and early home TV sets probably weren't exactly Adobe RGB calibrated either.

What we see today, in restored digital blue-ray versions of the early color shows, likely wasn't anywhere close to what was rendered at home with similar technology:

I can remember seeing my first color TV in the late 60's or so (Brinkley and Hunt was on as I recall) at my grandparents house (it was a 21" console job which according to grandpa was the biggest one that you could get at the time). We got one a few years later. Keep in mind that this was in San Francisco and not some backwater town out in the middle of nowhere. They weren't very common yet as people usually waited until their old B&W sets went on the fritz before they shelled out the big bucks for a color one.

Anyway, the old sets were not calibrated at all. There were 3 knobs on the back (Red, green and blue) along with the vertical and horizontal hold and brightness. Most of the first color sets had all of them them sticking out but people invariably ended up reaching behind to tweak one of the hold knobs (something fairly common back then as the set tended to slowly drift off of what you set them to because of vacuum tubes if I had to guess) and ended up twisting one of the color ones by mistake. Later sets had them recessed and had to be turned with a regular screwdriver. Usually when the set was delivered the guy setting it up would set the color using a test pattern generator attached to the antenna leads and a card with the right colors on it. Even then you had to wait about 5 minutes for it to warm up and then the colors would look pretty good.

As to TFA the old, old TV shows had some hideous makeup that looked positively horrendous (like green skin horrendous) but when shown on the B&W sets they looked perfectly normal. That the stage setting were garish doesn't surprise me at all.

fusillade762:zeppo: The cinematographers who supervised the lighting of 1960s color TV shows had a special eyepiece to show what the set looked like in B&W. Black and White was in the majority well into the 70s, actually.

Trek looked great in color - in fact, it made NBC's parent company a ton of money by selling RCA color TVs - but it looked so-so in black and white, which also tended to have smaller screens, when people bought color sets, they bought a bigger set (bigger for the 60's that is!). (The remastered Trek looks absolutely amazing on an HD screen, especially when it is being streamed. ) Trek always scored near the top of the so-called 'color ratings'.

Came to mention this when I saw Trek mentioned upthread. That show was almost a loss-leader for RCA/NBC.

And KILLED Desilu - which was also producing Mission Impossible, another expensive show, at the same time.